Keith Richards Tells Paul McCartney the Rolling Stones Door Is Open: “He Really Misses Being in a Band”
Keith Richards has a habit of saying things that sound casual until you sit with them. In a July 2026 interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music, promoting the Rolling Stones’ album Foreign Tongues, the guitarist did it again. He talked about Paul McCartney not as a rival from another planet, but as a working musician who still lights up when he is one player among several.
“I’ve realised that Paul really misses being in a band, you know? And his joy of just being in that context is great,” Richards said. “So, if there’s, ‘Got any more songs to do?’ I’ll let you know, Paul. … I’d like to do more with him.”
That is the line now being recast as an offer for McCartney to “join the band.” It is not a press release, not a new lineup, and not an announcement that Sir Paul is about to replace Darryl Jones on bass for the rest of the decade. It is something more interesting: a 82-year-old guitarist telling an 84-year-old bassist that the studio is still a place they can share.
Not a feud, never really
For sixty years the Beatles and the Rolling Stones have been sold as opposites. One band was the clever, melodic, studio-perfect unit from Liverpool. The other was the dirty, blues-soaked London gang. Newspapers needed a rivalry. Fans enjoyed picking a side. The musicians themselves kept crossing the line.
McCartney and John Lennon wrote “I Wanna Be Your Man” for the Stones in 1963. The Beatles later cut their own version with Ringo Starr on vocals. In 1967, Lennon and McCartney added backing vocals to the Stones singles “We Love You” and “Dandelion.” Richards still remembers those sessions. “I’ve known Paul for well, basically, since The Beatles started, since we started, but only on the periphery,” he told Lowe. “John and Paul did a couple of backup vocals for us way back when.”
The friendship never required the two groups to become the same thing. McCartney has said, more than once, that the Beatles were the better band. On Howard Stern in 2020 he agreed the Beatles had a wider range of influences. In a 2021 New Yorker interview he went further: “I’m not sure I should say it, but they’re a blues cover band, that’s sort of what the Stones are. I think our net was cast a bit wider than theirs.”
Mick Jagger’s reply at the time was typical Jagger: McCartney was “a sweetheart,” and “there’s obviously no competition.” He also pointed out a difference that still holds. The Stones became a stadium band and stayed one. The Beatles never did a proper arena tour with a modern sound system. One band ended in 1970. The other is still arguing about whether to tour.
Richards’ latest comments suggest none of that old scoring still matters in the room where the work happens.
Two albums, two bass parts
McCartney has already been in that room twice in three years. He played bass on “Bite My Head Off” from Hackney Diamonds in 2023. He returned for “Covered in You” on Foreign Tongues, released 10 July 2026. Both parts were cut in the same session. Jagger later told NME he had asked producer Andrew Watt whether McCartney would accept the brief: a fast, punk-leaning tune, overdriven bass, no fuss. “Paul did exactly what was needed in, like, 10 minutes,” Jagger said. “It was very easy.” On the newer track, Jagger added, the part was more funk than the earlier punk blast. He still would not have recognised McCartney’s usual style on it.
McCartney’s own account of the day is almost boyish. He described walking in and thinking, there is Mick, there is Keith, there is Ronnie. “I went home that day, and I’m saying to everyone, ‘I just played with The Stones!’ I was glad I wasn’t blasé about it. It’s really exciting. Not everyone plays with The Stones.” All he had to do, he said, was play bass and not make mistakes.
That is the feeling Richards heard. After more than fifty years as the decision-maker in his own projects — Wings, then a long solo career, then the late-life touring machine — McCartney still gets a charge from being one instrument in someone else’s band. Richards recognised it because he has spent his whole adult life inside that exact arrangement.
What “joining” would actually mean
The Rolling Stones’ core remains Jagger, Richards and Ronnie Wood, with Steve Jordan on drums after Charlie Watts’s death in 2021. Watts still appears on Foreign Tongues through earlier recordings. The guest list around them is crowded: Robert Smith of the Cure, Steve Winwood, Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Benmont Tench, even Bruno Mars on cowbell. McCartney is one name among several, not a new Stone.
Richards is not proposing a merger of the two most famous catalogues in British rock. He is proposing more of what already works: another song, another afternoon, another chance to stand in a circle and play. “It’s also great to have somebody from your own era, from way back when,” he said. “He’s a lovely player.”
That last point is easy to miss under the headline. McCartney is one of the most famous songwriters alive. In the Stones’ studio he was hired, in effect, as a bassist. He took the job. He finished it quickly. He went home pleased. Richards noticed the pleasure and filed it as an open invitation.
The late chapter both men are living
Foreign Tongues is the Stones’ 25th British studio album and their second collection of originals in three years after an 18-year gap. Watt produced both records. Richards has said leftover energy from Hackney Diamonds is the only reason the follow-up exists so soon. Jagger has already talked about writing for whatever comes next. Touring is another matter. Richards has said stadium runs may be finished; residencies in a few cities are more realistic. The travelling, he has admitted, is what takes it out of you.
McCartney, for his part, has never stopped. He headlined Glastonbury at 80. He still records and still treats a band as something you get inside, not something you merely own.
The clickbait version of this story is that Keith Richards offered Paul McCartney a seat in the Rolling Stones. The real version is smaller and better. Two men who defined the 1960s still share a language. One of them thinks the other is happiest when he is not the boss. He has told him, in public, that if there are more songs, the call will come.
That is not a reunion. It is not a fifth Beatle or a fourth Stone. It is two surviving members of a vanished era finding, late, that the simplest job in the room — play your part, don’t get in the way, enjoy the noise — still works. Richards has left the invitation on the table. McCartney already knows the address.
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